Tricks and Glitches

Boss Invincibility Bypass

Similar to Mega Man 10's Triple Blade, the Magma Bazooka in this game fires three shots which can individually bypass the bosses invincibility timer. This is shown during the refight with Magma Man.

Concrete zip

Concrete shots are fired a short distance ahead and then form a solid platform a second later. If you manage to be inside the block before it forms, you will remain inside the block as long as you are on the ground. As soon as you jump, you will be pushed forward a small distance to zip you out of the block. This is used as much as possible whenever we have the concrete shot out. In a real time attack such as this one, it takes too much time to switch to the concrete shot and refill it to be able to be abused excessively. An in-game time trial would not count the time it takes to switch weapons, and would be able to refill the concrete shot and zip through the whole game.

Stage by stage comments

Concrete Man

Pretty straight forward stage. There is only one known improvement in this stage. A 3 frames improvement can be found at the ladder at the miniboss. The trick is involves a very brief zipping by holding the ladder for a frame and then immediately releasing it gives you the tinniest boost while the screen is scrolling to the right. The boss fight went perfectly.

Magma Man

Thanks to Concrete Shot, AngerFist managed to find a window of opportunity at the lava area. If he was one frame later during where he managed to find a gap, he’d have died! So that’s how tight it was. We redid this stage a few times. The boss gave Diggidoyo a lot of issues. Atma helped out, pointed out some things, speed things up. We happy bears ^_^

Galaxy Man

Where do we start?... We redid this stage sooooo many times because you can approach it in so many ways. Easily the most painful stage. What you see in this stage is from big amount of testing various routes. It’s a quite long stage aswell. We utilized Concrete Shot to the maximum by obtaining twice a big weapon refill. Rush coil route proved to be slower and determined that Concrete Shot was the fastest route.

Hornet Man

Diggi and I fought back and forth in this stage  Some rooms he was faster than me and some rooms I had the advantage. In the end, Mr. Doyo prevailed by a few frames :P This is the beauty of teamwork. Boss fight went quite fast thanks to Magma Man’s weapon.

Jewel Man

We also redid this stage quite a few times because we had to plan carefully our weapon management. Hornet Chaser can be tricky to manipulate depending on where you want it to travel but we managed.

Splash Woman

Comfortable stage. Not hard to tas. Not much to say. Splash Woman fight can be quite a tight fight but thankfully she is programmed to move specifically that way each time you fighther. Therefore it was a relief to forget about rng for a while in a boss fight. Speaking of which, that fight is a frame perfect fight. Meaning every Hornet chaser hit her on the earliest frame possible after each of her invulnerability periods were over.

Plug Man

lots of zipping, we got inspiration from biggyboi. Diggidoyo did a great job in this stage! He had to plan carefully Rush Coil’s health in order to have enough HP left before reaching the last at the end of the stage. Plug Man was denied fastly!

Tornado Man

A lot of Rush Coil usage in this stage.

Wily 1

Lots of big refill initially of the stage. Wait until you see how much we got in Wily 3. The M takes longer to use compared with getting refills so that’s why we got refills here and there. The boss fight is quite interesting one. Took a while before we determined keeping Rush Coil was the fastest. Initially, we tried a stronger weapon but switching weapons takes time so

Wily 2

It was important not to use other weapons so we could refill less using the M. Boss: first phase went pretty well. Middle went fast! Last phase, Diggi tried to fire the last shot before it closed its mouth but he couldn’t find a way to connect earlier. Therefore he had to wait until it opened its mouth again.

Wily 3

AngerFist did most of this stage and as we stated before, our goal was to obtain big refills as much as possible, which we certainly showed in this stage. It was a really funny stage to tas. We tried our best to show tasing maneuvers by being very close to those deadly spikes and enemies. Diddidoyo performed that impressive Mega Man Moonwalk during the boss fight :P

Wily 4

The order of the refights was chosen in order to require one less weapon switch (saves 70 frames). What stood out the most was the Tornado fight where the last shot with huge amount of Diggi swag hit Tornado Man

Closing Comments

AngerFist

Finally, I’d like to especially thank my man Diggidoyo. I honestly and wholeheartedly enjoyed working with him as he saved frames where I couldn’t spot them and he always is a positive and fun guy working with.

Diggidoyo

I first started TAS'ing this game back in 2012 and back then I was a little skeptical about it because of lingering problems with Dolphin at the time as well as the absence of the quick weapon switching Mega Man 10 has. After completing a few stages, I let this project drift to the side and forgot about it.
The hiatus was ended when it was finally rejuvenated by AngerFist and got4n late in 2014. Dolphin has come a long way since it's first introduction into TASvideos, and it now provides a relatively smooth platform to TAS on. There's still a few missing capabilities that would be nice to have, but for the most part this game was much more enjoyable to work on than Mega Man 10.
There are a few places we've spotted in the run that could use a touch up to save a few frames, but doing so requires extra RNG manipulation which either ends up losing more frames than it saves, or breaks the run entirely. Perhaps this can be resolved once hex editing is more refined for the Dolphin.

Thanks to AngerFist for working with me on this and keeping me motivated. Having a partner helped to find optimal strategies and we were able to leap frog improvements all the way to the end.
Special thanks to Atma for keeping our WIPs in check, Biggyboy for his optimizations, Scepheo for his working .dtm editor, and Got4n for rejuvenating this TAS from the dead.